The present invention relates to a slip printing system, which is employed, for example, in a mobile order receiving/placing system for receiving/placing orders in door-to-door sales.
At the scene of the door-to-door sales, when a sales person receives an order, an order receiving slip, on which details of the order are written, is typically given to the customer. Generally, such a slip is a predetermined form, on which the sales person writes the items ordered by a customer, unit prices and quantities thereof are written by hand. Further, the sales person calculates a total price by adding prices of the ordered items, each of which is calculated by multiplying the unit price by the quantity of the item. Typically, such a calculation is performed using a hand-held calculator, and all the information is written on the slip by hand.
When the sales person hands the order receiving slip to the customer, the order is confirmed between the sales person and the customer. However, in order that the orders is actually placed, the order collected by sales person should be input in a spreadsheet or a data base on a computer system, and centrally managed. Therefore, in a conventional order receiving/placing system, the sales person is required to input the information same as the information written on the order receiving slip after returning his/her office.
Generally, there are a plurality of sales person, and each sales person receives orders from a plurality of customers. In such a system, a large amount of manual procedures of the sales persons are required, and the data flow is inefficient since the same information is once written by hand and then input in the computer system. Further, in such a system, human errors may likely occur. Furthermore, until all the sales persons input the data for all the customers, an entire ordered status is unknown and the order will not be placed. That is, when each sales person receives the order from the customer, it is impossible to know, for example, the stock status of the ordered item.